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Kagi Snaps

help.kagi.com

180 pointsaleksi75 comments

This is why we need competition, and to stop the big guys from buying the small guys. This is trying to innovate for the customer, making search better for my areas of interest and desires. One of the few subscriptions that make me very happy.

Thank you Kagi folk that hang out here.

Kagi is becoming the new google. Same thing, offered in a new package. If there are 100 good results for a query, why always show the same results in the same order?

Because of their “we serve the results as is and you customize the results yourself” policy?

Kagi doesn’t have search history of any of their users, so they can randomize them at best, which makes no sense.

> Kagi is becoming the new google

Kagi has exclusivity deals with trillion-dollar corporations and a monopoly on search?

That seems like a particularly bad faith interpretation of their assertion.

I disagree. What makes Google Google nowadays is their size. For example, they are full of AI results because these sites optimise until they show up in Google results first pages. Why, because Google owns the largest share of the search market.

Kagi has 30k subscribers, it is totally uninteresting to these AI results farms. This is just one example, but I hope you see my point. I cannot see Kagi beginning to compare to Google.

I think what OP meant was that he dislikes kagi’s search algorithm on a specific ground that also happens to apply to Google. The way it’s phrased is pure trolling though, or clickbait if you prefer.

15 years ago, Google search was actually good and returned relevant results.

Kagi is becoming the biggest and most profitable ad company in the world?

Sooon :D

If you make the same query twice, relatively close together, they give you back the same results.. this is intentional, since it won't consume another search request, and it allows you to return to your search if you didn't find the results you wanted on the first pass through...

They don't save the search results as history, this is simply a short-term cache.

Kagi is different from Google because they have a financial incentive to not serve you AI junk websites with optimized SEO. They're not targeted by SEO companies / optimizers.. and even if they were, unlike Google, you can simply ban the domains. If that domain pops up a lot because it's just an SEO optimized content stealing site, you never have to see it again.

I expect kagi will eventually care about the age of domains and the amount of people that are marking these as junk domains, as part of their search results.. because they have a financial incentive to make us happy, whereas Google has a financial incentive to make us click through multiple websites and revisit their search page, and make additional searches with different words, so that they can serve more advertisements

Isn't this just catching up? Google has site:reddit.com, it's more keystrokes but a lot less idiosyncratic and thus generalizable to any domain.

Kagi has the same syntax as well, this is just new syntactic sugar

"just syntactic sugar" is the whole point of computers. Make drudgery and toil easier. @r is a lot easier than site:old.reddit.com or whatever. :-)

Kagi is already ahead of google, in my opinion, for my search needs.

It may be because I've been able to customize my domain raise/demote/block list, so my version might not be "stock search results", but that's kind of the point...

I see the domains relative to what I know generally has what I like...Google could have implemented this in their last decade... But they really don't care if you need to come back to their search results 3-4 times clicking through the next few pages because that's ad revenue and there's no competition

Another interesting thing to note in the recent release[0] is that they now have an Android app in the Play Store, and it will pave the way to include Kagi in the default search engine list for Android and Chrome.

> Additionally, a recent EU ruling presents a significant opportunity for Kagi. Google is now required to include any search engine that meets specific criteria, such as having an app with over 5,000 installs, in the default list for Android and Chrome.

[0] https://kagi.com/changelog#4813

Why would an app be a requirement for a search engine? To me it would make more sense to be aligned with how many users the search engine has. 5,000 unique per month, or whatever.

I have the Kagi app on my iPhone, but just so it can be an extension in Safari. In a perfect world, I would be able to go into the settings, add a custom search engine, and be done with it. No app or extension needed. Then when it hits a threshold it can be added as an easy option for people to pick from a list.

> Why would an app be a requirement for a search engine?

Because otherwise you can’t use it as a default search engine on the platform, because it doesn’t allow it. Same for iOS. They had to write an app to intercept search requests and redirect to Kagi.

I suppose. Since there was a threshold to cross, I was assuming the search would need to get baked in as an option natively.

I tend to like how Firefox does it, where any search the user goes to, there is an option to add it as a search option and set it as the default. This should be the standard all browsers use. Junking up a phone with apps just for what is ultimately a setting change isn’t ideal.

The hacks Kagi has to do for Safari is annoying. They’ve gone so far as to make their own browser to make it better, though I’m sure that’s not their only reason. I’ve had some issues with the Safari extension over the years. I hope Apple changes their approach on this.

You can totally use it as the default search engine, all you have to do is switch to a different launcher that actually gives you the freedom to customize your search settings bases on your preferences. Eg, Nova Launcher, Lawnchair, Niagara, etc.

Well, launcher is a very central part of your phone experience. I don’t think many people will change that just because they can.

Personally, this is one of the reasons I don’t like android anymore. You have to tweak it endlessly to make it halfway work. The platform’s management load is too much. I don’t want to manage and mangle another computer in my pocket. It wastes too much time.

Will this allow kagi to be used on the forced search widget at the bottom of the screen of pixel phones ?

Because the blog mention that Google will be forced to propose kagi in the default search engine list given 5k installs, but even with it installed I cannot set kagi as my search engine on that widget.

On the contrary if I install duckduckgo or bing, I can choose one of them to replace Google in that widget.

EDIT: android itself talks about the 5k limit for the "choice screen" during initial setup [0], but there is no mention of how the list is populated afterwards

[0]: https://www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/searchengine/

> Will this allow kagi to be used on the forced search widget at the bottom of the screen of pixel phones ?

I understand that currently the app does not replace it, but once Kagi has more than 5000 Android installs and we submit a request to be included in choice screen, and given that privilege it would do.

They've seemed very focused on their AI assistant recently, so I'm happy to see a useful new search feature.

Happy to see that custom bangs work (eg a discourse forum I visit), but eventually I'd like to specify how far along the path to "snap".

I'd like my @javadoc to hit `site:docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/docs/api/` instead of the current `site:docs.oracle.com`.

Check the latest release notes for all search improvements that went out in this release:

https://kagi.com/changelog#4813

I have stopped to pay Kagi because their obsession to employ AI everywhere.

I am leaving Google because the AI crap.

I mean: Companies seem to be using AI everywhere without a clear justification, just for the sake of using it, but that’s not the issue.

The problem is that Google ruined its reputation by showing completely inaccurate results when it started displaying AI-generated results.

They are much more level headed about it, and they openly say that “AI is a tool and addition to search. Kagi is fine without it”. For their rationale, see “LLM Features” page in their help, which is linked at the bottom of Kagi Snaps page.

I don’t use any LLM features of Kagi, and it’s not hindered in any way.

Yeah, Kagi is fine without it, but if they would spend all the effort they pit into AI into normal Kagi search, Kagi could possibly be amazing without it. E.g. Kagi could spend their time on improving deep site search (Stackoverflow/Github/Reddit) which is one of the few areas where they still lag behind Google.

I think biggest obstacle in front of normal Kagi search is index size. Kagi is a multi-index search engine for now.

IMO, as they improve their (own/in-house) indexes, I think they’ll be able to build more features on top of standard Kagi search.

Isn't the problem that only google can crawl new reddit pages now?

That would be a very wrong characterization of Kagi does with AI.

We have a an AI integration philosophy that we have been following since day one.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html

The primary guideline of that philosophy is that any AI feature is opt-in and on-demand rather than being pushed down the user. So to characterize our efforts as you did, can at best be described as doing disservice to reality. Why the need for that?

We do currently have a field to override the domain used for snaps (the `ad` field in the bangs repository[1]) which doesn't have much validation and is useful for situations like this. It's possible we'll expose this for custom bangs in the future, but for now I can add that as a bang to the main repository, as it seems like it would be generally useful.

[1]: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs?tab=readme-ov-file#bang-...

https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs/commit/55e8612cd5f19b292...

I would normally agree. But Kagi's AI thing doesn't annoy me in ways it does in other products. End a query in a "?" to get a quick summary with links to the sources. Normal search results below.

This looks cool but is too similar to "site: reddit.com" for me.

What would be super awesome, imo, would be if I could assign "some sites" as a short code, then snaps that.

So for instance, I might put html, phoenix, CSS, and tailwind spec/references all as one grouping, and then I can search "select drop-down @phoenix" - and search for that across all references (so I can see the html spec alongside the tailwind and phoenix docs)

You can create a custom lens that includes those sites and point a custom bang at it.

For example I have a custom QT lens that only includes results from [*.qt.io, *.stackoverflow.com, *.github.com...] and a !qt bang pointing to it at https://kagi.com/search?q=%s&l=8

(you'll have to change the l= id to point at your lens)

You can already do that with Kagi lenses (if I understand you correctly)

I would also say that probably this feature was nearly custom made for Reddit and there are few other sites that you would probably use it on. For this feature to be useful, a few things need to be true:

1. The site has a lot of content worth parsing such that it's worthwhile to limit your search to only that site.

2. The site itself has a garbage search functionality that you would not want to use instead

3. You need to be searching that site frequently enough that there is a need to shorthand it instead of typing out the long form syntax

4. The site must have content that is generally picked up best by a traditional search indexer e.g. mostly be text based in what you want to search

There are relatively few sites like that in existence. Probably if I mentioned the above requirements to anyone well versed in internet, Reddit would be the immediate first example out of anyone's mouth. Perhaps there are a few other sites that might meet the mark (Stackoverflow and Github come to mind in my example, or possibly other social media giants heavier in text based content as well. Or Hacker News, ofc). But most other large sites' search story is better enough that even then I would probably not naturally use this feature instead.

> What would be super awesome, imo, would be if I could assign "some sites" as a short code, then snaps that.

My app https://multi-launch.leftium.com already does that! (Except with buttons; bang triggers coming soon...) Note you need to give browser permissions to open pop-ups, otherwise multiple tabs cannot be opened.

- Docs/examples: https://mm.leftium.com/doc

- All buttons share the (text) input at the top. ENTER inside the input triggers the first blue button.

- Blue buttons launch all dark gray links in their category.

- Gray buttons launch individual links.

- Light gray buttons are excluded from the launch group (but they can be manually launched.)

Recently I realized bangs and launch buttons are just bookmarks. So I'm currently combining these concepts so you can launch bookmarks or groups of bookmarks with a bang trigger. (As well as take notes for a URL!)

---

- The very first iteration of this idea launched multiple images searches at the same time: https://is.leftium.com/

- Now implemented as a launch group: https://mm.leftium.com/?p=C4S2BsFMAIF5oEQEkC2BDA5jAypNAnAYwA...

Great feature! Kagi is awesome.

See also the settings for personalized results - block useless domains from even appearing.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/personalized-results.htm...

Bangs are nice on the browser but Alfred is faster and more intuitive. I’m combining them

I wish there were Alfred alternatives for other operating systems

Such as Albert? [0]

[0]: https://albertlauncher.github.io

This is nice.

I previously made a custom bang for reddit to do exactly this. I guess I can delete that now and do the same thing on every site without all the setup.

Kagi is so nice. They give me the power to do these things on my own, while adding it in natively so over time less and less setup is actually needed.

Kagi is one of the few subscription I don’t think about cancelling on a weekly basis.

Do snaps offer any advantages over site:whatever.com?

Less typing

Marginally quicker to type:

@r vs site:reddit.com

After a few tries, I also find the first more intuitive.

It's nice too. I have several "Snaps" before snaps existed, i used `!red` for `site:reddit.com`/`!sub rust` for `site:reddit.com/r/rust` searches and whatnot. `@red` will be a lot easier!

Chrome has had a similar feature for many years. Arguably quicker because you can assign any key press(es) you like. For example I have mine setup such that typing ‘drive foo’ searches Google drive for the term foo. I had kagi as my default search engine but had Google easily available as a back up by typing ‘g <search term>’ in the address bar.

Unfortunately, having both search engines easily available led me to discover as much as I like Kagi I just use google more, despite its ads. Google is faster to get answers to simple questions (it usually answers them on the results page, without another click) and shows more results, although you need an extension for the latter.

More info on how to set up these shortcuts here: https://superuser.com/a/1806652

> Google is faster to get answers to simple questions (it usually answers them on the results page, without another click) and shows more results, although you need an extension for the latter.

Kagi has a quick answer feature: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

If you add a question mark to the end of your query, it uses an LLM to generate an answer using the first few results (with citations to the sources).

What you’re referring to are bangs, which Kagi has offered for a long time already. For your example that would be !g to search on Google. You can also add custom bangs.

The new snaps addition is something else: it gives you Kagi search results, but limited to that website. It’s the same as adding site:stackoverflow.com to your search query, but with an easier syntax (same syntax as bangs, but with an @ instead of an exclamation mark).

It appears to be a UI thing, but it's an excellent UI thing: it reuses familiar bangs and has an autocomplete/discovery mode for new bang codes.

I'm sure it's highly likely google will either heavily deprecate/drop this feature altogether. It's already happened with other query tricks.

I had already started using Kagi to create bangs that run searches like “site:reddit.com %s” but glad to see this made even easier!

That's nice but it becomes really useful at global OS shortcut level. Those types of shortcuts have been a mainstay of my Alfred setup for a while.

I expect this in search engines. I have to test this for searching websites with difficult to use search like Reddit or the Nike website.

Could you configure the @ symbol? Why are all these prefixes !@ the worst keyboard corner positions with modifiers?

Doesn't Google already do that with the site:blah.com keyword ?

Love Kagi - so worth it

is there a web standard for this kind of things? Some sort of hyper media that points the search engine to a search endpoint inside a domain?

Bangs but better

Awwww, yeah. One of my favorite features just got a lot better in a way that seems totally obvious now that I’ve heard about it, but hadn’t even occurred to me until then. I’m a very happy user, coincidentally wearing the shirt they sent me.

Is it worth paying for Kagi when it's future is uncertain? Are there any real competitors for paid search?

Is it worth investing early in better things so they have a chance?

Yes.

The worst that can happen is the better thing goes away again, and your payment goes away too.

If Kagi goes away, it should be relatively easy to switch to an alternative :-)

Kagi is already profitable and organically growing, so at least from a financial standpoint the future is certain.

I was going use `@` to extend bangs with scopes, like NPM scopes: https://www.leftium.com/bangtastic/#scopes

There are multiple bang providers, often defining their own conflicting internal bang triggers. So bang scopes would let you specify which provider to use.

I guess I'll have to use another character... Maybe `$` for $cope

See also: DuckDuckGo's Bangs - https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Kagi has bangs. This is different. It's a shortcut for "site: somesite.com", while a bang just redirects to the somesite.com search results page.

Now add a snap for local search in my machine and it's all I have ever wanted :)

Sick idea. We’ll need an OpenSearch or equivalent cluster indexing your local fs right? Can we do this just in browser (and would we even want to)?

"Snaps is an exclusive Kagi Search feature that allows you to easily limit search results to a specific website..."

WTF is this marketing bullshit?! Default Google Search is useless now and I'm rooting for Kagi, but this "exclusive" untruth is decidedly NOT the way to "win".

Google's "site:<domain>" search has been around for years: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/sear...

Not related, DuckDuckGo's "bangs" https://duckduckgo.com/bangs which has, likewise, been around for years.

*sigh*

It clearly shows in the example that @r translated to "site:www.reddit.com" in their resulting search- I did not read "supporting domain search in general" as being Kagi specific.

The Kagi specific part is /easily/ searching a site in Kagi.

The whole point here is that they are extending the already supported bangs[1] to search the domain with "@", thus if "!r" exists to redirect to Reddit's search, you can use @r to search Reddit within Kagi.

Of course I could type "site:Reddit.com" that's what I've been doing for years, including on Kagi, but easily doing that with @<bang> seems exclusive to Kagi.

[1] Kagi maintains an open source list of supported bangs here, you can even do a PR to add even more: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs

My concern was not with the ability to do the "site-specific search", but the bullshit regarding this feature to be "exclusive" to Kagi.

If you're saying a different syntax makes something exclusive, I have some highly non-performant macros to sell you.

All you have to do is not cut off (in the quote) the obvious ergonomic difference between a short code

@ lsm

and a long one

site:long-site-naem-with-a-ttpo

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